Using Darcs

Testing and submitting patches

We would love you to help us improve GHC by submitting patches to us.
Guidelines for submitting patches to GHC are here: WorkingConventions/Submissions.

Please test your patch using the validation script, before you sbmit it. (If you have write permission to the repository, then you must validate before pushing the patch.)

The Bug Tracker

The following are GHC-specific policies for using the Trac bug tracking system.

When a bug is fixed, but the patch or patches still need to be merged to other branches, then
don't close the bug, just change its type from "bug" or "task" to "merge". Also add a list of
patches to be merged, and which branch to merge to, as a comment.

Milestones: we have milestones for each release, and three special milestones:

An empty milestone field means the bug has not been triaged yet. We don't yet know if the
ticket is a real, unique, issue. Once this has been established, the ticket will be given
a milestone.

Not GHC is for tickets that are not tied to a GHC release, because they are in libraries
or other software that is not released with GHC. Bugs in the "extra libraries" typically fall
into this category.

_|_ is for tickets that have been triaged, but we don't plan to fix them for a particular
release. This might be because the bug is low priority, or is simply too hard to fix right now.

Severity: this is set by the submitter of the ticket, and indicates how important the issue is to
them, i.e. is it preventing them from doing something altogether, or just a minor annoyance. The
severity might be reduced if we discover a workaround.

Priority: this field is for the GHC development team to help us prioritise what we work on. Bugs
that have a high severity will tend to be prioritised higher, as will bugs that are regressions from
a previous release.

Test Case: fill in this field with the name of the test in the test suite. Typically every bug
closed should have an appropriate test case added to the test suite.